18/01/2025
Haleakala’s Red Hill – Pu’u ‘Ula’ula
Discover Haleakala's Red Hill. Witness the sunrise, ancient tales, and unique landscapes in this revered Hawaiian locale.
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I'm Bruce the owner of Hawaii Aloha Travel here in Honolulu.
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Making the Hawaii Connection
Bruce Fisher spends his days telling visitors about Hawaii, but his own first impressions are somewhat hazy. His first visit was when he moved here in 1992. Working a radio shift at night, Bruce got a crash course on Hawaii culture during the day.
That crash course took on new intensity when Hurricane Iniki hit the island of Kauai on September 11 of that year. Bruce got to the island just after the impact. There was no way to get information to or from the island: telephone lines were down, and radio stations were off the air. “I left with a cassette tape recorder, one change of clothes and about $20 in my pocket,” Bruce says. “I had a hotel room and a car with a full tank of gas.” What he thought would be a one or two day trip stretched to nine days, and that tank of gas had to last six because it was not possible to get more. The hotel stopped serving meals his first night, and the room became uninhabitable due to mosquitoes.
But none of that stopped Bruce and his microphone. He recorded interviews with everyone he could find, giving the tapes to Civil Defense pilots who delivered them to Oahu as they flew back and forth between the islands. “The radio station would broadcast that “Bruce is going to be at the church in one hour, meet him there to get messages to loved ones,” says Bruce. “The radio station played the tapes all night long, sometimes raw (unedited). It was the only way for people to find out about loved ones.”
For most people not born in Hawaii, learning how to pronounce local names and place names takes training the tongue to move in unfamiliar ways. Bruce hadn’t had much time on the islands and remembers getting coaching on pronunciation during the commercial breaks of live broadcasts. “I didn’t know how to pronounce Nāwiliwili (a major Kauai harbor),” he says, laughing. “I tried to avoid using the names because I knew I was saying them wrong.”
